PDC 2009 Azure Announcements

Microsoft's announcements on the first day of the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) focus on the the corporation's continuing assault on the cloud. As Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, put it, "We're more reinvigorated than ever." Ozzie defined a corporate vision of developing for three screens and a cloud—PCs, phones, TVs, and delivery from datacenters to the cloud.

Ozzie revealed the next generation of Microsoft Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners, plus a new information service, codenamed "Dallas," available through Pinpoint and built on the Windows Azure platform. With Dallas developers and users can access premium commercial and reference datasets and content on any platform.

Bob Muglia president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, delineated a few strategic investments to allow developers to move applications to the private, hosted and public clouds, enhance them with additional services, and transform them to take full advantage of capabilities unique to cloud computing. Product announcements in these areas include Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, a set of integrated, high-level application services that enable developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud. The hosting and caching technologies formerly known as “Dublin” and “Velocity” are folded in with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control (formerly referred to as .NET Services). Together, these technologies deliver a consistent set of application services to enhance both Windows Server and Windows Azure with a common, scalable foundation for running .NET applications. Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 is available for download at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric with final availability in 2010. Look for more CTPs of Windows Azure platform AppFabric technologies in 2010.

Muglia had a few more announcements:

More announcements should be forthcoming in tomorrow’s keynotes given by Scott Guthrie and others. In the spring look for announcements about Windows Live and Windows Phone at MIX.